


Off-Script

by gaps42



Series: Learning [5]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Character exploration - no plot, F/F, Grief/Mourning, I love Max with my whole gay heart, Implied/Referenced Character Death, It's elmax but it's not romance y'all, Just thinkin about Max's reaction to That in the last episode and, Not my forte but here we are, Other, You don't have to read the rest of the Learning series for this but it's compliant, kind of, season three spoilers, sorry - Freeform, this happened
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-29
Updated: 2019-09-29
Packaged: 2020-11-07 15:47:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20819825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gaps42/pseuds/gaps42
Summary: A moment in the aftermath.





	Off-Script

**Author's Note:**

> season three spoilers!!! has it been long enough that i don't need to warn for that any more  
i was really interested in max's reaction to billy's death this season, so i started thinking about how complicated her feelings would be mourning him and this came out. it's kind of based off of this ig post my friend showed me that said "el and max both think of the other as the superhero and themself as the sidekick" and i'm obsessed with that idea so here's them needing each other i guess!!!<3

The sympathetic, worn look on Mrs. Byers's face is worse than any refusal would be, because she knows she can't do anything about it. “She's sleeping,” Mrs. Byers says, instead of a greeting.

Max nods. “Can I come in anyway?” she says, already stepping over the threshold. She knows they have to do this script every time, and after weeks of the same she knows her lines by heart, but sometimes she wishes they could just jump to the end, or at least past the part where she has to pretend not to see the sadness and, even more painfully, the understanding in Mrs. Byers's eyes.

“Of course,” Mrs Byers says, ducking behind the door to let Max shuffle all the way into the front hall. Max toes off her worn sneakers, the awkward silence that seems to fill any room she's in with somebody who's trying to work up the nerve to go off-script ringing loudly in her ears, and she lets her long hair swing over her face to hide her expression. She's grateful for Mrs. Byers – she's really the only adult who knows and believes anything about what the party has been through, if you don't count Steve, which Max definitely doesn't – but as desperately as she wants it, as furiously as the small, selfish part of her rails against her mother and step-father's grief because they can't ever really, fully understand Billy's loss, when she's face-to-face with Mrs. Byers's pain it only reminds her of how real her own is.

Mrs. Byers knocks softly on the bedroom door, so faint it's almost like she doesn't want it to be heard. “Sweetheart?”

Max's ears roar, a spike of adrenaline like she's flying through the air after trying a complicated new move on her skateboard and she's watching the pavement come rushing up to greet her before she can stop it, until she hears the familiar murmur through the thin wood and she can breathe again. This is part of the script, too, the polite dance they've fallen into as they try to remember how to act like real people, and none of them have dared to deviate so far, but this is always the pinnacle, terrifying moment where everything can fall apart and the pain and rot can find her and take her like she's seen it take Billy with one, small denial.

But even through the rushing in her ears she hears it, and she tries not to look like she's shaking as hard as she is when Mrs. Byers reaches for the door handle with a little smile that almost looks apologetic. “It sounds like she's up,” she says, unlatching the door but pausing with her blue-veined hand on the knob before it can swing open. “Have you eaten? I can bring you two some snacks.”

Max shifts from one foot to the other, forcing herself to meet Mrs. Byers's eyes instead of pushing her way past her into the room like she desperately wants to. “I already ate,” she lies.

The understanding in Mrs. Byers's eyes is almost unbearable, but Max holds her concerned gaze resolutely; if the past few weeks have taught her anything, it's that everything is temporary, and she can get through this temporary moment if it means it will bring her to the end of the script more quickly. “Well, there's food in the fridge if you do get hungry,” Mrs. Byers says, still holding the door closed as she raises her eyebrows like she's trying to convey a secret message beneath their usual routine. “I'll be right down the hall. You ask her if she's hungry for me, okay?”

“Okay,” Max says, with her most polite, agreeable smile. Mrs. Byers purses her lips, and Max feels a swoop of terror in her empty belly when she pauses like she's going to say something else, but she only lets go of the doorknob and steps backwards, letting the bedroom door creak open a few inches.

Heart pounding so wildly in her chest she feels a bit sick to her stomach, Max slips past the older woman and through the doorway, clicking the latch closed behind her without looking at it. The blinds are drawn over the slit of a window above the single bed pushed against the far wall; only the hint of the bright afternoon sun peeks through the slats, falling over the rumpled blankets in faint streaks, and Max is padding across the room before her eyes fully adjust to the dim light, manoeuvring around the second, empty bed mostly by muscle memory.

The nest of frizzled brown hair stirs as she approaches the far bed. El rolls over slightly, pushing her tangled waves out of her sleep-flushed face as she peers up at Max, and Max has to pause for a moment, overwhelmed by a memory of crawling back into a different bed on a different sunlit summer day. Max feels like she barely remembers that person, so confident in her self-righteous fury, and she's hit with such a wave of exhaustion at the memory of caring so much about something – anything – besides this moment in the routine that she almost sinks onto the bed despite El propping herself up on one forearm right beneath her. El's face is pinched with the sleep-addled confusion of being half-awake, but she still gazes up at Max with the same unquestioning trust she had from Max's rainbow sheets what feels like years ago now, and Max is so grateful for her, this tiny, solid, unchanging force in her life's chaos no matter how closely she follows the scripts everyone else around her needed her to act out.

“Max,” she exhales, like she's been holding her breath since the moment Max had left her bed the day before and she's finally able to let it go at the sight of her, which, coincidentally, is exactly how Max is feeling looking at her.

“Go back to sleep,” Max whispers with a small smile that's only partially forced, reaching out to pick up the glossy-covered magazines and comic books littering El's bed. El is working on getting her reading up to a level where she'd be able to go to school, and although she's supposed to be reading the classic literature everyone her age has already read and studied so that she would be starting at the same level as her class-mates, she's fallen in love with Max's romance comics and seems to not be interested in anything else. Worse, she always asks Max to read them to her, no matter how many times she's heard the story, and Max gives in to her every time. She knows she should be encouraging her to at least read by herself, as Mrs. Byers and self-appointed tutor Nancy have gently pointed out to her over and over again, but even introducing El to romance stories, reading flowery declarations of love while El is curled up against her chest to match her breathing, stirs that guilty, secret feeling in her empty stomach she refuses to put a word to, and it's hard to feel any worse than having _that_ eat away at her guts already hollowed out by grief in the presence of her only source of comfort, so she chooses the short-term solution that at least makes El smile.

El doesn't seem to want to be read to today, despite being surrounded by Max's leant books; with a great, crackling yawn, she wriggles herself away from the edge of the mattress, rubbing one eye with her fist as she sleepily watches Max pile the magazines at the end of her bed. Max takes the hint and kneels on the bed in the spot El has just vacated, reaching down to pull the sheets tangled around El's legs. El reaches up with one hand to tug at her arm, and Max sinks onto the bed to lie beside her willingly, unable to resist a second longer despite the sheets still being hopelessly wrapped around El's feet.

El's mussed hair tickles her nose, and she squeezes her eyes shut, trying to feel everything about this moment. She's so close to the end of the script, a few rituals away from what she selfishly keeps coming back for every day, and with El's warmth finally, _finally_ beside her again words come to her effortlessly for the first time that day. “Were you sleeping all day?”

“No,” El whispers. Her fingers dance over Max's cheekbone to the hair at her temples, and Max makes the conscious decision to bask in it; if they don't name it, they can't be doing anything wrong, and she's so, so tired of everything except for this. “Joyce took me into the garden. There were ants on the flowers. Then we cleaned the kitchen. Joyce told me to read my science textbook, but I read your favorite anthology again. When I read stories you've read me, I hear them in your voice.”

Tears pool on her desperately-shut eyelashes, but she takes a deep breath. _Not yet._ “I can read it to you,” she whispers.

“No,” El says. “Not now.” She runs her fingertips through Max's hair.

Max reaches for the hand not caressing her hair and holds it to her own lips. She doesn't kiss it – no matter the justifications she can make in her own mind for going through this ritual every day, she'll never cross that line, because even through the haze and the pain and the guilt she knows better and, worse, she knows that El doesn't – but she holds it to her face, breathing in El's scent as she presses her knuckles so forcefully against her mouth that her teeth ache. El is warm and solid and real, inches away even when the rest of the world feels out of her reach, and whatever other dark secrets she'd been harbouring even before she'd watched the life leave her step-brother's eyes no matter how loudly she screamed, this was all she came here for. Max went through the rituals her friends and family needed her to so that they wouldn't feel what she felt – avoiding any behaviour her drunk step-father and enabling mother could possibly be upset about so that they still had one child they could face, teasing the boys to draw them out of their dark contemplation and distract them from their clumsy attempts at comforting her, placating Mrs. Byers's genuine, motherly concern by mustering the strength for an agonizing, temporary moment of showing the older woman her best face before she can escape to El's room – and even though she reminded herself that every moment was temporary, sometimes it was more than she could bear to get to the next moment, and the only thing that got her through those moments was knowing that one of them would eventually bring her back to El. Despite dealing with the same pain Max was, more than anyone else who had been at Starcourt that night, El was warm and solid and real, every day that Max came back to lie next to her like this, and it was the only thing that made her believe that somehow, eventually, Max herself could start to feel real again.

“What do you want to do?” El whispers.

She's continuing her last thought, following the script they have that she probably doesn't even know Max forces herself through so that El gets something out of Max clinging to her like a lifeline, too, but the question makes tears well up in Max's eyes before she's ready for them. She sobs against El's hand, wet and embarrassing when she can't bear to pull it away from her mouth, and El wriggles closer, tucking her solid body as tightly against Max's as she can with her hand still trapped against Max's face.

“I don't know,” Max confesses, and a fresh wave of tears stream from her closed lashes down her cheeks to soak El's hand. “I don't know what to do.”

El doesn't say anything; she sniffs and presses so close Max feels the pillow her head is resting on sinks slightly under the other girl's weight, but she knows there's nothing she can say to stop either of their tears, no script or ritual that she can do that will fill the inescapable, gaping holes in every part of their lives where Billy and Chief Hopper used to be, and this is why Max comes here, why El is the only one she still lets herself cry in front of.

This moment of relief is just as temporary as the unbearable series of moments she has to force herself to endure to get here, but knowing this only makes her pull her friend closer and let herself live in it anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> hopefully that got all my angst out and i can write my actual wips now alskjhlfgjhf;hg


End file.
